At 16:36 -0400 7/22/97, David L. Hanson wrote:>No, we can't stop it. Not when government educators claim that they>can give individual instruction to each student in the same classroom>when the range of the students' IQs can range from 50 to 150 (due to>government school policies of inclusion and heterogeneous classrooms).

You make "government educators" sound like something evil. I suppose youmean educators that work for the government, which certainly includes agood number of members of the list. What I see is a dedicated group ofpeople trying to do their best for the children of this country. It sureisn't the prestige or big salary...

Further, your assertion that anyone believes that each student is supposedto be given individualized instruction is a distortion. How could that bepossible? A more viable view would be that a strong program of instructioncan be designed to meet the needs of a broad range of students.

>I strongly contend that it is not possible and when our children>attended a government school, before we started to home educate them>six years ago, we saw first hand that the government schools couldn't>and wouldn't challenge our sons in math.

You *strongly contend* that it is not possible. However, proving thatsomething cannot work is very problematic, as you have to account for allpossibilities. On the other hand, to prove that it can work requires onlyone case. And I have personally experienced (as a classroom teacher) andseen (observing other teachers) many classes meeting the needs of a verybroad range of students. Indeed, I strongly contend that homogeneousclasses are less effective because there is less diversity in ways ofthinking about things, which translates into less richness in discussions.I have seen many cases where that proverbial 150-IQ student gains importantinsights from supposedly less able students.